Education of Bear Hunter

Rating:
Summary: A little too much for me!
Review: I am very interested in bears and have purchased several books on the subject in the past year. I am not a hunter, but fully understand the need for the sport and am neither for or against it. However, when the author of this book describes how he hunted down a sow bear and as an extra bonus "put a bullet through the head" of it's cub trying to excape down a tree, I even became repulsed and put down the book. Scenarios like this are replayed throughout the book to the extent that it obviously becomes a sick obsession. Your better off without it.

Rating:
Summary: best of the best
Review: The education of a bear hunter is far and away the most captive book of it's kind.Written by the equally gifted hunter and author,Ralph Flowers.Any true hunter will be captivated by his autobiographical accounts of his many years of hunting both for pleasure and for hire.A true education that will enlighten and mesmerize any sportsman,or bear enthusiast.

Rating:
Summary: The Education of A Bear Hunter
Review: This book is 277 pages jam packed with interesting bear hunting stories. Mr. Flowers personally killed over 1,000 bears in his life as a bear hunter. Now before we condemn him as a game hog or some form of reprehensible market hunter we must understand the circumstances under which he lived and worked. He lived on the southwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula in the State of Washington. Washington has more black bears than any other State except Alaska, and in Washington Ralph Flower's is called the Bear man.
Mr. Flower's has had "bear-hunting fever" ever since his first encounter with a bruin, in 1948. For twenty years he worked as a forest protection agent, he was a hired professional hunter: he has spent more than 2,000 working days - in addition to much of his own time - hunting for bear, and he probably is better at it than any other man alive.
His quarry is the black bear, which, unlike the grizzly, is thriving in most regions and continues to thrive in the areas he hunted. There are many parts of the country where black bears are abundant enough to allow good hunting without any danger to their population. There are some areas where they do considerable damage to the woods, girdling and killing trees and reducing the habitat's ability to support other wildlife. In Mr. Flower's part of Washington, the bears subsist principally on the cambium layer of trees during certain times of the year. One bear can destroy as many as 60 trees a day.
Thus it became Mr. Flower's job to take as many bears in the endangered area as he could. Some of his time was necessarily devoted to snaring bears with cable foot snares that, unlike conventional steel traps, do not wound the animal. However, Mr. Flower's still managed to take dozens of bears each year by sport-hunting methods. He preferred still-hunting and tracking with dogs the very skills the recreational hunter must master.
In The Education Of A Bear Hunter, Mr. Flower's shares what his unique career in the woods has taught him. Not just a consummate skill as a hunter, but a keen and sensitive awareness of the environment and a true respect for the wildlife he shares it with. He is a thoughtful man with and uncommon gift for expression, and anyone who has ever hunter bears, or dreamed of the adventure, will want this book not only for is wealth of hunting lore and woodcraft but for it's gripping narrative.